EARLY WORK

Steve Miller marks his works as commodities; the commodity identity label and the personalized hand mark are on the same level. The abstract signs of control: graphs, maps, computer codes take on the sign conventions of individual expressive freedom. The paintings are designed to be consumed in discretely separates worlds…..His work is an index of the historical fact that these two realms have been sealed from one another forever as independent spheres of consumption…..

Adopting that intermediary vantage point of the consumer who is forever caught between images, Millers work reflects this political unreality. The paintings touch on the emptiness, or what Baudrillard calls the “implosion of meaning” in mass culture. The radicality which this vantage point provides is in a confrontation with the “loss of meaning” which Baudrillard ascribes to the context of consumerism, wherever there is the mark of the commodity, from the supermarket to the gallery.

Rosetta Brooks, 1993, from the catalog; Steve Miller: Five New Works, Burchfield-Penney Center, Buffalo, NY